The education kicked off in Kuwait as ‘a private education’ after the authority refused to contribute to the establishment of the Al- Mubarakiya as the first school of its kind, and it was named after the founder of modern Kuwait, Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah (1837-1915), and that was in the year 1912.
Education before that, even long after it was mostly rudimentary and was given through the Kottab (elementary school primarily used for teaching children in reading, writing, grammar and Islamic subjects, other practical and theoretical subjects were also often taught).
* * *
The initiative to build the Mubarakiya School started as a popular initiative, but those who adopted the idea collected only about 50,000 rupees for its construction, and it was thirty thousand rupees less than what was required.
The project would have almost failed had it not been for the wealthy Qassem and Abdul Rahman Al Ibrahim, known for their generosity to donate the rest of the money from India, where they worked, provided that the education was modern, and not limited to religious subjects, as usual.
* * *
There is no explanation to how and when the administration of the Mubarakiya School moved to the government, and it was often abandoned to the state when the Great Depression afflicted the region following the collapse of the pearl prices, and that was in the early 1930s.
Approximately ten years after the establishment of the Mubarakiya, the pearl merchant Shamlan bin Saif, who was one of the major donors to the Mubarakiya opened the Al-Sa’ada School. This was in the neighborhood of “Ibn Khamis” in the Sharq area and Khamis was its first headmaster but it closed with the Mubarakiya, for the same reasons.
In 1938, Shiite notables built the Ja’afariya school, which today is considered the oldest private school which still operates and the Ma’arafi family played a major role in its founding.
Although I never knew its exact location, it touched the high level of the school when I was young through the level of its students who used to enroll with us in public schools to complete their studies, as they were all better than us in mathematics and in both Arabic and English.
In an interview conducted by well-known journalist Yousef Al-Jassim, I mentioned that historically private education has not received, sufficient government attention, and this may apply to public education, as its concern focused on the financial disbursement on the salaries of its educational staff and its buildings, and this is the reason for the impression that non-government schools are for non-Kuwaitis.
However, with the continuous rise in the quality output by private schools, which was accompanied by a decline in the level of government school outputs, the situation has changed, as the majority of distinguished private school students have become children of able citizens.
Some believe that the reason for the setback of public education is mainly due to the absence of a clear national education policy, which allowed the religious current to control the joints of education for decades, and these forces disrupted any reform efforts, therefore the situation is currently almost impossible to reform without the full support of the government through a complete educational revolution accompanied by cleaning the ministry of all remnants of the religious parties, even if they are in the transportation sector.
The funny part or perhaps what is strange is that the government has never appointed a director to manage private schools from the graduates of these schools or universities.
e-mail: [email protected]
By Ahmad alsarraf
